Please do not open a public GitHub issue for security vulnerabilities.

Use one of the following channels:

• Private vulnerability report (preferred): Use the Report a vulnerability button on the Security tab. This keeps the report private until a fix is available.
• Email: Contact the maintainer directly at the address listed on the NCCU Schultz Lab GitHub profile.

A useful report includes:

• A description of the vulnerability and its potential impact
• Steps to reproduce (minimal example if possible)
• The version of Plottle affected
• Any suggested fix or mitigation

• Acknowledgement: within 5 business days
• Assessment and triage: within 2 weeks
• Fix or workaround: depends on severity; critical issues are prioritised

The following behaviors are intentional and documented — please do not report them as vulnerabilities unless you have found a bypass of the existing mitigations:

• User-provided expressions in Analysis Tools and Data Tools. Formula and curve-fit expressions are supplied as text and evaluated by Plottle.

  plottle.data_tools.add_formula_column evaluates them with an AST whitelist (_safe_eval): the expression is parsed, and only arithmetic, comparisons, and/or/not, conditional expressions, subscripting, literals, whitelisted names, and direct calls to the documented math functions are executed. Attribute access, imports, lambdas, comprehensions, assignments, and indirect calls are rejected. Exponents and expression length are bounded to prevent trivially constructed hangs.

  Row filtering (filter_rows) delegates to pandas.DataFrame.eval, which uses pandas' own restricted parser.

  What this does and does not guarantee. The whitelist is intended to prevent an expression from reaching the Python runtime — the filesystem, the process, or the import system. It is not a resource sandbox: an expression can still allocate large arrays or run for a long time. Treat it as a robust barrier against code execution, not as a guarantee of availability. If you find an expression that reaches attribute access, an import, or any callable outside the documented list, that is a vulnerability — please report it.

  Note that Plottle is designed to run on localhost for a single user. Binding the Streamlit GUI to a public interface exposes every input surface described below to anyone who can reach the port, and is not a supported configuration.

• File uploads execute no code, by design. Session files (Export → Load session) are decoded without pickle: arrays carry an explicit dtype, shape, and raw buffer, and anything not safely representable is refused rather than deserialized. Session files written by Plottle 2.0.1 and earlier used a pickle-based encoding; those entries are refused on load, not unpickled, and the loader reports what it skipped.

  plottle.io.load_pickle / save_pickle remain available in the Python API, where the caller has chosen to trust the file. .pkl is deliberately not accepted by the GUI's file uploader or batch folder import.

• Local filesystem access from the GUI. The Data Upload page's batch-folder import reads a user-supplied absolute path from the machine running the server. This is intended for local single-user use; do not expose it on a shared host.

This policy covers the plottle package and its Streamlit GUI and CLI. It does not cover third-party dependencies — please report those to their respective maintainers.